1268. EBB to John Kenyon
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 7, 160–161.
[London]
May 30th 1843.
Can I ever thank you enough for all your kindness about that poem? [1] that is how I travestie your “can you ever forgive me”?
It wd be very convenient to take “soother,” but I am obliged, as you will be when you consult the context, to object not to the word but to the meaning. Nobody is reproached for thinking God’s song untrue—the imagined deficiency being not in truth but beauty. This might do …
“To think God’s song no sublimer
Than the tale of earthly rhymer”.
but having made the alteration (which will prove me guiltless of indolence) I must confide to you that although the objection to “smoother” struck me at first as a tangible one, on going back to the passage I certainly think that the original lines are more expressive & convey my meaning better. “Smooth” as applied to a “song” evidently means the full music of it, & is constantly used by the poets in that sense … altho’ I miss my authorities in a sort of head-darkness– Do you not think, on consideration that the epithet in this place helps the metaphor of “God’s song,” & gives a force which is absent from the apparently stronger word “sublimer”.? Think about it. I had better not think any more, for it makes me too positive. Schiller [2] & his party evidently are of opinion that there’s a hitch somewhere in the great divine song, & wd make it run ‘smoother’ out of their own fancies!
To think God’s song is not smoother
Than the tales we tell each other! [3]
Well—and then for your “brief immortals”– Are not brief immortals, mortals? At any rate, if they are to go “to dust & Hades by the common doom & track” they must be verily mortals! Did not the objection occur to you from a remembrance of one line, instead of from an examination of the context? You may well eschew contexts!
Are you very angry with me? But I am very grateful to you in exchange, my very dear & kind friend, & would not for much more worth than the poem’s, appear self-willed & perverse about it or anything to you–
I promise you faithfully every opportunity of being bitten by Flush, .. & with an awful sense of your power in the severe (proclaimed by the “twanging horn”) [4] remain notwithstanding
Ever affectionately yours
EBB–
Think of my forgetting (ominously) the aspiration– If <***>
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. i.e., for his constructive criticism of “The Dead Pan.”
2. A headnote to “The Dead Pan” indicates that it owed its inspiration in part to Schiller’s “Götter Griechenlands” and Kenyon’s paraphrase thereof in The Keepsake for 1843.
3. When published in Poems (1844) the couplet read: “To think God’s song unexcelling / The poor tales of our own telling—”.
4. Cowper, The Task (1785), IV, 1.
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